Ideas That Pop Into Mind From "Nowhere"

Or so it seems.

Elizabeth: By a happy coincidence, just when we were planning to talk about the mysterious experience of ideas or memories seeming to pop into your head out of the blue, my book club happened to be reading Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway. At the very start of the book, the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, makes note of this strange quirk of mind.  

Clarissa is on an errand to buy flowers for her party that evening, and the lovely morning takes her back to girlhood at the family’s country house. Immediately she is again a girl of eighteen, the love object of Peter, a young man who is visiting. Her mind goes to a scene in which she stands gazing out the open window at the lovely morning and the flowers, until the smitten Peter says,

            “Musing among the vegetables?...I prefer men to cauliflowers.” 

Clarissa interrupts her train of thought and takes note of both her surprising recollection of this particular sentence and, also, the odd way the mind works. Of all the memories she could have had, Clarissa thinks, 

“...when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.”

Later in the book, “cauliflowers” reappears, tipping us off to the fact that Clarissa’s memory of the sentence was connected to the turning point in her life. Peter uttered the words on the day she decided not to marry him. The passionate young man was, as his unusual remark demonstrates, too unconventional for her. Instead, she went on to marry the less exciting, Mr Dalloway. At the moment when Clarissa was startled by the memory, however, she had no idea of its significance or of why it arrived when it did. All of this the reader eventually learns, along with the basic truth: what pops into mind does so for a reason.  

Barbara: Didn’t Woolf write that book 100 years ago? It’s impressive how she was able to capture the quality of interior thought, the continuous free associations, the way it all has significance, even though we may not necessarily be aware of, or even suspect, what that significance is. 

But let’s talk about your experience with this phenomenon; let’s talk about your amazement at the way the idea for the first line and title of your book — “Don’t Say a Word!”— seemed to come from nowhere. I remember how you described it: as though it had fallen into your lap! Can you put that moment into context? 

Elizabeth: As I’ve written in an earlier post, I’d been telling friends about my parents’ unraveling for the ten years of their decline. I dealt with the frustration of being completely unable to protect them from themselves by seeing their behavior in a comic light. But the idea of turning this story into a book did not occur to me until both my parents had died, in fact, not until I really felt that they were dead. They'd been far too intimidating for me to ever take them on while they were alive. 

Then, almost as soon as the idea of writing the book occurred to me, it was followed by the idea of starting with the scene at Thanksgiving, which was when my mother made an out-of-character announcement that shocked me into seeing that she and my father were changing. I wanted to tell the story the same way that I’d experienced it—chronologically—and this was the beginning. 

Then, when I went back in my mind to the Thanksgiving table, the words of the gag order that preceded my mother’s out-of-character announcement lit up like neon in my mind: “Don’t say a word!” She knew what she was about to do was dumb and didn’t want me to say so. I actually saw the words. And then, immediately, I thought, “That could be the first line. It could be the title!” These thoughts arrived in one fell swoop, one after the other, seemingly out of the blue. And what followed was the gleeful notion: not only would I say a word, but I would “say” 100,000 words!  

Barbara: What is so extraordinary is that “Don’t Say a Word!” says so much. It captures the motivating force for revenge — the propulsion behind your defiant writing. And it articulates the central tension in your life: your parents silencing you. It seems to me that many various threads came together to lead to the experience of this idea for the book “popping” into your mind. It may have seemed as though this title and theme came out of nowhere. But, in fact, you had been creating a narrative for ten years, honing that narrative with each new outrage that occurred, as you told and retold it to friends. By the time you had the idea to write a book, you had a well-rehearsed storyline. You also had become more aware of how much you hated being silenced. And perhaps, by the time your parents had died, there were events in your own life that contributed to the idea that you could confront your parents, at least on paper, in a way you hadn’t been able to before. 

Elizabeth: Well, I had closed my architectural office. I didn’t feel I was cut out for the work. There were many factor, but a major one was that I lost myself in trying to satisfy the conflicting needs of the clients, staff, and contractors. Writing had an obvious appeal. I only had to please myself! I loved the idea of diving into a new creative endeavor, but I’d once felt that way about architecture, too. So I was driven to make writing more personally fulfilling. It sounds absurd, but I felt I needed to justify my existence! Not by any particular achievement, but just by leaving behind something I could be proud of.

Then, at that point, I was extremely lucky to find my way to a writing class with an exceptional teacher, the writer, Gail Pool. The second essay I wrote in her class told the story of my family’s trip to see the Monarch butterfly site in Central Mexico; but the real subject was the endless fighting in my family, which I had come to feel hid more affection than was obvious. I wrote many, many drafts before I got it right, that is, before I found a way for what felt like my authentic self to be telling the story. When my last version came up in class, Gail said, “This is a good edit!” Five simple words, but I can still hear the exclamation point in her voice. That experience opened a door for me into how editing works. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the first essay in which I recognized my own voice (which I lost and had to recover many times).

I took the chance of sending the Monarch story to my mother, mostly to show her that I saw a less negative way of understanding the fighting. Now I can see that I was sending a kind of peace offering. But, when I phoned her two weeks later to see if she’d received it, I met the usual dismissive response. Even now, the recollection of that conversation makes my cheeks burn. 

Nevertheless, I somehow mustered the nerve to send the essay to my friend and mentor, William Maxwell, the New Yorker editor and novelist, whom my husband and I had met and fallen in love with, along with his wife Emmy, when we were traveling abroad, in the early years of our marriage. I assured Bill that I was not seeking help getting the piece into the magazine (which was way beyond my even imagining). I still can’t believe he thought well enough of the story to show it to another editor for consideration. 

The approval of two writers I revered put my mother’s dismissal in perspective. Gail and Bill became my imaginary defense force. I would never have been able to conceive my book as an act of defiance had it not been for them.

Barbara: Oh my! So many threads! Well, I asked for context, and, in fact, when one digs down, context is always complex. If you step back and look at all the things you’ve been saying here, you can see the numerous forces that were all leading to the concept for the book title “popping” into your mind. It was hardly out of nowhere! It was actually the consequence of years of anguish, and struggle, and efforts to make the experience with your parents less painful, plus your drive to write well, and your feeling that you were making progress, and having found writing authorities who valued you. 

What’s also astounding about your experience is that those few words that popped into your mind were such a perfect synthesis of all of the psychological dynamics! The line, “Don’t say a word!”, says so many things simultaneously — it’s your mother’s gag order turned against her; it’s defiant; it’s funny; it’s ironic because you’re about to say 100,000 words!

Elizabeth: When the line came to me, that was my thought, too, “What could be more perfect?!” It felt like an incredible, surprise gift from outer space.

Barbara: But, of course, it came from you! The experience of its seeming to come from outside you, as though it wasn’t actually your idea is what gives it a magical quality. That unexpected “gift” from nowhere resulted from your mind working away without your awareness. It wasn’t the answer to a problem you’d been consciously trying to solve. Nevertheless, your brain had been working all along. Complex processing was taking place in which all of the dynamics within you were interacting: the wish to speak in your own voice, a fear of breaking the silence and asserting control, a drive to create, your budding confidence. You may not have been consciously trying to solve a particular problem, but you were in emotional turmoil. All the while your brain was chugging along in the background, because that’s what a brain does. It’s always working. And then it just spits something out. Yours produced your mother’s gag order.

Her words came to you the way the words of Clarissa’s admirer came to her: untethered. Seemingly out of nowhere. However, you recognized the significance of what your brain had delivered. If you step back a moment and reflect on this experience, an essential aspect of creativity is contained here in your recognition of the multiple uses you could make of those four words (plus an exclamation point, of course). 

I think the essence of creativity involves, first, a mindset that facilitates the use of the brain’s extraordinary, synthetic “processing power” and, secondly, the recognition of what the brain delivers… something new and entirely personal. Creativity feels like magic, or a gift from the muse, because there’s a gap between the processing that goes on outside-of-awareness and the idea or mental image that bursts into consciousness.  

Dynamic systems theory attempts to model this sort of phenomenon. It elucidates fundamental principles that can be used to describe the behavior of very complex systems, for example, the weather, a city, or the brain. Take a hurricane, or a snowflake. Large or small, these are unique, structured entities that can be said to “emerge” from interactions of water and wind, heat and cold, the spinning of the earth. Key to an emergent phenomenon is that it goes beyond the sum of its component parts. 

In a complex system, it is impossible to predict future behavior with certainty. We can only know that it is probably going to rain on Memorial Day, and our accuracy gets better and better as the date approaches. This is similar to knowing that 12 year-old Jose is probably going to go to college and knowing this with more and more certainty as his high school graduation approaches. However, although you cannot predict with any certainty going forward, it is possible to look back and see the factors that came together and contributed to the behaviors that emerged. 

This theory can also help us to grasp that an idea emerges from the basic components of the brain — neurons, neurotransmitters, glial cells, etc.— though, as yet, we don’t really know how. Mind emerges from the brain. Ideas emerge from the brain. To give an example, “Don’t say a word!” was like a snowflake or, more aptly (given how it altered your life), “Don’t say a word!” was like a hurricane.

Elizabeth: How perfect!